More than 4,000 Palestinian civilians have been brutally murdered since September 2000; more than 30,000 injured, a lot of whom have permanent disabilities due to these injuries. Most of these people are under the age of 18.

In the last week alone, horrible massacres of Palestinian civilians took place in the Jenin Refugee Camp and in Nablus in the West Bank. Footage of injured and killed women, children and elderly was the norm in news channels around the Arab World, as the young men were escorted into public school yards and tied up for days without food or water, reminiscent of the concentration camps in Germany and the Holocaust.

The problem is that in American news, you hardly get any reports on these brutal murders of Palestinian civilians. You only hear the Israeli side of the story.

Thousands of trees in Palestinian towns have been uprooted by Israeli forces, all because they allegedly hide “terrorists.” These trees have offered basic subsistence for Palestinian citizens since time immemorial. Palestinian houses are demolished, demonstrators are imprisoned without a formal trial, and, in the last year, daily bombardment by American-supplied F-15s and F-16s has become a seemingly-permanent phenomenon in the Gaza Strip and West Bank skies. It seems that this year, the Israeli “Defense” Forces have chosen to eradicate all Palestinian infrastructure, cutting off electricity, water, demolishing the Palestinian Ministry of Planning, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Education, the UN building in Gaza, the Palestinian Airport in Gaza, and so many other buildings.

The Israeli authorities say they are destroying the Palestinian “terrorist infrastructure.” What was the crime of Iman Hijjou, a 4 month-old Palestinian girl brutally murdered by the Israeli occupation forces? Or for that matter Muhammed Al Durra, the 12-year-old shot by more than ten Israeli sniper bullets? Were these children terrorists too? The list of children goes on.

The Israeli policy of “closure” has turned Gaza and the West Bank into huge prisons. Ordinary Palestinians (and lately Arafat himself) cannot leave the country without Israeli approval. They cannot even go from one Palestinian area to another except with Israeli approval, which is rarely granted – even today almost nine years after the signing of the peace process in the White House lawn in 1993. It was estimated in a 1997 study prepared by the UN Special Coordinator’s Office in Gaza that the policy of closures costs the Palestinian Authority more than $6 million a day, in lost revenues due to loss of exports, inability to import and loss of wages. With an unemployment rate of more than 65 percent in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, most Palestinians have nothing to lose but resist the brutal occupation, often compared to the late apartheid system of South Africa.

The whole world recognizes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return or compensation, and the Palestinian rights for Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as embodied in UN Resolutions 191, 242 and 338 which recognize these areas as occupied territories. This is the reason why Israel is the only country in the world where its alleged capital, Jerusalem, does not host its foreign embassies. Rather, all countries of the world have their embassies in Tel Aviv, because Jerusalem, under international law, is an occupied Palestinian city. Yasser Arafat, the President of the future state of Palestine, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, for signing the Oslo agreements in 1993.

And what about Ariel Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister? Wasn’t he the war criminal of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians were killed in Lebanon, in the space of a few days, under his supervision and guidance? In 1982, the independent Kahane commission of inquiry, an Israeli commission, found Sharon “unfit for any political position,” guilty of war crimes and he had to resign from his position of Defense Minister. The irony of history is that the same Sharon is today’s prime minister of Israel – for only in Israel can a general indicted of war crimes one day become prime minister.

Sharon and his accomplice, Mr. Mufaz, now head a campaign to destroy Palestinian cities and towns, in the process I described earlier.

The truth is the Israeli government of today is not fit to bring peace to the region. The voices of so many Palestinian, Israeli and world scholars and intellectuals, such as Dr. Edward Said, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Dr. Tanya Reinhart, Mr. Israel Shamir, Mr. Robert Fisk, and so many others do not make it to the mainstream media. These people, and many others, have objected to the brutality of the occupation. Demonstrations around the world, organized by Muslims, Christians, and even Jews have denounced the systematic wiping out of the Palestinian people.

The U.S. government has to stop vetoing the international UN peace-keeping mission to be sent to the Palestinian occupied territories. This mission should remain until it is not needed – until a Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as its capital. Palestinian prisoners, 8,000 since the beginning of the Intifadeh, should be released and refugees return to their historical homeland. Only then can Israelis and Palestinians dream of peace.

Aref Al Farra

ISU Alumnus

Amman, Jordan